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General: Home Sweet Home
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Player housing in MMOs is a feature that many champion as one of the best outside of questing and adventuring. In today's Player Perspectives, Isabelle Parsley talks all thing housing. See what she's got to say and then let us know what you think about in-game housing in the comments.
The first time I encountered housing in an MMO, last millennium (no, really), it was in Ultima Online, which I played all too briefly – but one look was all I needed: I was hooked. Despite the funky graphics and the constant threat of death to my puny person from, well, just about anything passing by, the sight of actual houses in an actual game that people actually owned – current legal discussions on in-game property aside – was something of a revelation.
Read more of Isabelle Parsley's Player Perspectives: Home Sweet Home.
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Comments
Give us a hint as to what games these images came from. I'm not familiar with them. One of them looks sort of like something from Vanguard, but I'm not 100% on that.
Good article on an excellent topic. Put in non-nistanced housing and player retention will greatly increase. I miss having a place I can plop stuff. Achievementsare one thing, but if you could hang a plaque that anyone can come and see would be fantastic.
Gaming since Avalon Hill was making board games.
Played SWG, EVE, Fallen Earth, LOTRO, Rift, Vanguard, WoW, SWTOR, TSW, Tera
Tried Aoc, Aion, EQII, RoM, Vindictus, Darkfail, DDO, GW, PotBS
I'd actually consider UO housing superior.. You can customize absolutely everything about your house now. It's astounding.
Other than that.. Good article!
Good article, though I'm not too keen on the housings necessity to be in open world (unless its purpose was solely to merch / barter).
But we all know (unfortunately) this is toward the bottom of a game's design list, if at all and will most likely never be as robust as we'd like. Cheers to hoping though
well the 1st image is from this site, and i think it's DF
http://www.warcry.com/news/view/92952-Darkfall-Expansion-Arriving-This-Month
2nd image is EQ2
3rd image is Wizard 101, i think
4th image is untraceable
5th image is, i believe Free realm
So What Now?
You'll have to ask the pic genius, but I agree with TweFoju on where they come from. I'd be interested to know what #4 is myself!
Couple of links I didn't get around to putting into the column:
EQ2 home show blog -- http://eq2norrathianhomeshow.blogspot.com/
SWG galactic showcase - http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?topic_id=446718
I love the idea of real world housing but my problem with it is two-fold.
One, having acres and acres of abandoned houses really isn't a good thing. My thought on this is that houses in general should deteriorate if players cancel their subs. If they resub it stops the detioratioin but they then need to spend time building it back up. If they are unsubbed for a while then they could just lose the plot. That's my take on it anyways.
Otherwise you have plots that will never be used and abandoned structures that might just stand there.
Two, are there really going to be enough plots in the game world for thousands upon thousands of houses?
I love the idea of civilized areas and areas that are not civilized. But given that these games worlds aren't really too large, I wonder if thre really can be enough room for everyone without completely wrecking the landscape.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. A. Einstein
#1 is Darkfall (commonly released image)
#2 is EQ 2
#3 is Wizard101
#4 is from Atlantica Online
#5 is FreeRealms
Good job, everyone!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I like how DAOC had housing, The houses weren't instanced but they were contained in their own Zones. You would go through a gate in low walled spot and zone into a housing area. There were multiple housing areas and you could zone between them and each had plots of land that you could buy and build a house. There wre different size housing, including Guild houses/ mansions.
Housing and indepth crafting.. if a mmo has both of these like SWG HAD... Im hooked for life.
Screw up the game and the economy.. HOUSE FOR SALE!
Loved SWG housing. Us old SWG vets used housing sadly to protest the NGE as we left for other games. It was amazing to have a place to make our own shops to sell are crafted gear and loot.
I was an explorer type so i spent a great deal of time finding rare spots on mountains to place my small tatooine house style two. Then I would pop my vendors load them up with crafted gear give them my crafted gear to wear and made them say something starwarsy.
And off I went to hunt rebels. it would be nice to see this done in other MMOGs coming out. but it is hard to balance and hard to code i would imagine.good article thanks for making me remember this feature in games we don't see alot of much more.
I wish there was a feature on the game list that showed you whether or not the game has housing and/or guild halls, and maybe shows you if it's in-world or in-stanced.
Fantastic article! I could not agree more on all points really
Non-instanced housing made UO superior to EQ, it made SWG a great game, it was great in AC1 too. The instanced housing joke was a design that should have been deep sixed a long time ago. The problem is, to make non-instanced housing to work, you need a lot of real estate which many of these games out today don't have. Probably why we have not seen it introduced lately. Decay is a necessity though.
I love practical housing but see no point in Barbie's Dream House type of housing. I love how A Tale in the Desert handles housing. In SWG I used my house for storage space and to house vendors. The entire house decorating side of it was completely wasted on me and I would have the devs rather concentrate on expanding the possibilities of player cities.
Yeah, there just has to be decay.
And as you say, there is limited space. Heck, given all the players out there I could easily see "housing land" being greater than general game land.
And what of alts? Do they get to own their own house? My thought is one plot per account because otherwise that would be a mess.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
must be an age thing - our sons in their late 20's love housing in game. my husband and i (age 61 & 56) basically think it's 'meh'. but since i don't have to have, i don't mind if it's there.
Thanks for the information. I am a LOTRO player myself and if they would get rid of the hooks, I would love their housing like no other.
I always prefered housing that was really like a home. It would be someplace you'd want to log out in, do your crafting in, maybe be able to cure diseases, poisons, or other injuries in. Housing shouldn't just be a place to socialize in, but a place to reside in.
Important facts:
1. Free to Play games are poorly made.
2. Casuals are not all idiots, but idiots call themselves casuals.
3. Great solo and group content are not mutually exclusive, but they suffer when one is shoved into the mold of the other. The same is true of PvP and PvE.
4. Community is more important than you think.
Housing is very important to a game IMO and the more you can customise it the better. Thats why UO has great housing. You can build it brick by brick. None of this pre fabricated housing rubbish.
I used to visit this site a lot however in recent years it has become the home of negative forum posts, illogical opinions and tantrums so I visit less often.
Played or Beta'd: UO / DAOC / Horizons / EQ2 / DDO / EVE / Archlord / PirateKingsOnline / Tabula Rasa / LOTRO / AOC / Champions / Darkfall / Mortal Online / DCUO / Rift / STO / SWTOR / TSW
My husband and I are both 40. He love housing. For me, it's just a place to dump my junk. I don't think it is so much an age thing as a personality thing. I play to bash skulls, not to decorate, but my husband (who is also quite adept at skullbashing) also likes to acquire and show off things. The bigger and more ostentatious, the better, for him. So in EQ2, he had a big house, and I stayed in my starter house for the whole time I played. In UO, he had a tower, and I had a little house next door. It's just a thing.
And even instanced housing, like in LOTRO, means you can have neighborhood events. Without housing, I doubt I'd be playing LOTRO today.
Great article!
I loved the non-instanced housing that AC/Asheron's call had. There was clusters of neighborhoods all over the world. I had a notebook that I kept notes/coords in every time I would find a new cluster. The neighborhoods were all unique because the landscapes were all different.
I had my heart set on this one villa and I had a toon parked at it for a year. I would log her in every couple days to check on the rent to see if it might become available. It took me over a year but I got the house of my dreams upon a mountain, overlooking winding rivers in the valley.
Instanced housing just isn't the same. It feels generic...like a hotel.
58 here. I like having a house. I like to logout there and 'live' there.
My son, 30, prefers LARGE houses, I prefer the smaller basic home. While I enjoy living in my home, I am not an avid junk collector, so I don't need the space he does! I believe home ownership in game gives a sense of belonging to the community.